Chef's experiences building communities inside of large organizations where community isn't usually part of the job.

1. Community In A Box
Mandi Walls : DevRelCon London : 2016

2. Whoami
• Mandi Walls
• Technical Community Manager, EMEA for Chef Software
• @LNXCHK

3. whois Chef?
• Seattle, US based. Offices in San Francisco, Moorgate London, and Berlin
• Open Source project started in 2008 for Configuration Management and
Systems Automation
• Company founded in 2009
• Part of DevOps community from the beginning
• Customers include Facebook, Alaska Airlines, Disney, Standard Bank

4. Chef’s Community History
• Chef itself started as an open source project, built from code used by the
founders’ consulting company
• Gained interest, contributors, through online community of folks working on
similar tasks
Very organic growth via social media, IRC, etc

5. Chef’s Evolving Customer Base
• With wider interest in DevOps and IT modernization, customer base expanded
to include many “enterprise” customers
Financial institutions, government agencies, airlines, shipping and logistics, oil and gas
Much more traditional markets
• Plenty of things different from a technology perspective, but also a lot to work on
from an organizational standpoint

6. Lacking Community

7. Community Where There Was None
• Large organizations tend toward boundaries, excessive specialization, silos
• Our users were often divided up among multiple business units, departments
• Also divided by development strategy or other artificial segments
“Team A is doing Agile. Team B is still doing mostly waterfall. They share some services and
resources.”
• Hindered training, adoption, sophistication of solutions

8. Different Set of Behaviors
• Less exploration of outside ideas – related to risk, budgeting practices, etc
“Team A bought tool X, so only they get to use it.”
• Internal connections more tenuous, possibly political
• Less desire for external networking
• More reliance on top-down and command-and-control management

9. Missing The Benefits of Organic Community
• Learning from and sharing ideas with others with similar experiences
• Commiserating with others’ failures
• Reducing duplication of effort or re-learning lessons already learned
• Networking across parts of the business
• Support structures for internal assistance

10. Tools For Customers
Community In A Box

11. Use What We’ve Learned From Open Source
• Many of our customers weren’t familiar with technical communities in general
Different demographics from our earlier customer base
Longer tenure of employment
Less time or interest for looking outside
• Prohibited from using technologies like IRC and Slack for “security” concerns
• Some dissuaded from using Open Source technologies at all
Had a list of “permitted” technologies with commercial vendors
• We focused on customers already partaking in our Customer Success program
No real experience with what a technical community would look like

12. Models from Enterprise Customers
• Cerner – Holds their own DevCon conference, 2500+ employees, internal and
external speakers
• Target – Built a Dojo for teaching new methods, making sure info was available
to teams
• Disney – Has held summit events for contributors and management, multiple
internal forums and workshops

13. Inorganic Strategies
• Finding a Champion
• Picking Some Activities
• Setting a Reliable Schedule
• Communicating and Being Present

14. Champions
• Natural influencers – technical, managerial
Sometimes our primary customer, but not always
• The people with enthusiasm
Not necessarily the best at The Thing, but willing to be helpful
• Ever-expanding group
If a single champion leaves, the community can die
We work with these folks, as point of contact, invite them to our external
community, invite them to our spaces like Slack when they are able to join

15. Activities
• Focused on opening communication between teams, between groups of users
• External communities use meetups, social channels, so borrow those methods
• Lunch and Learn!
• Demo Day
• Whatever internal tools are already available: message boards, mailing lists, etc
• Internal DevOps Days, showcases, developer conferences
Invite external groups, vendors, etc

16. Schedules
• Keeping activities going, just like a regular meetup
• Even if the monthly lunch is just to chat or kibitz without a speaker or
presentation

17. Communicating and Being Present
• As a company, we do a lot of events, a number are focused entirely on a single
customer
• Important to focus on existing relationships while looking for new ones

18. Benefits to Us

19. Why Focus Resources this Way?
• Expansion and account retention
• Marketing opportunities in both directions
Using cool new stuff is a recruitment opportunity for many large organizations
• Long-term relationships with individuals
Our global Chef community grows stronger and more diverse when we have folks from
different companies involved and included

20. More About Chef and Our Customers
• https://www.chef.io/customers/
• Learn Chef! https://learn.chef.io/
• Join our community! http://community-slack.chef.io/
• Where are we: https://www.chef.io/blog/events/
• Email me: mandi@chef.io